Here's the first part of the interview I did with Philip Roth on Sept. 5. This part is mostly about his new novel "Indignation" and has lots of spoilers, so if you haven't read the book, you might want to skip over to the second part.

Q: How'd the idea for "Indignation" come about?

A: I wanted to write something different from my last few books, which had been about older men and their problems, so I turned back to an old idea I had which writing a book set during the college years of someone that coincided with the Korean War. So it began with, one, wanting to do something different than what I 'd been doing and two, wanting to look into the customs and morays of that period as they would have been experienced in a small liberal arts college.

Q: Was it liberating to get away from older men and their problems?

A: Yes, it was (laughs). It was interesting first of all as an act of recall. I was in college at that time and I had to remember and do some reading about the Korean War. As for what things were like at that time, that I remembered. Details of the war, I had to go back and do some reading.

Q: As far as choosing a narrator who's 50 years younger than some of your recent ones, how was it to step into those shoes?

A: It was fun to feel that freshness and eagerness -- not feel it, depict it, really.

Q: The butcher stuff -- did you have some knowledge of that?

A: I had a little. My closest friend growing up was the son of kosher butcher and I was in that store from time to time, especially when we were adoloscents and he was driving the delivery truck I sometimes went with him, so I had some knowledge of it, yeah, and the rest I sought out from kosher butchers in Brooklyn and just hung around for a day or two.

Q: If there's a moral if you want to use that word, in this book, it's that religion can kill you.

A: Religion can kill you? Well, they're not religious, that family, as a matter of fact. I don't know what can kill you. Anything can kill you. I wouldn't necessarily say that's the moral implicit or alluded to because they're not religious. Atheism can kill you.

Q: Well, true. I was looking at it in the sense of religion was being forced on him by the college, he tried to get out of it, and it led to his death.

A: Well, that came to me very early, but he's strictly speaking not dead but in a morphine induced state of unconciousness. His brain is quite capable of working. There's two deaths, as it were. One, there's an imaginary death. In a morphine state he imagines himself dead. Two, he does die but he's given morphine for his injuries. So he's narrating from a morphine-induced state of consciousness.

Q: From pre-death, so to speak.

A: Yes, pre-death.

Q: This is a shorter book as your last few have been. When you're contemplating a book do you have an idea of length and shape before you begin or does it reveal itself as it goes along?

A: I would say both. It dictates itself as it goes along but I do have an idea in the beginning of how much the weight the idea can carry. After The Plot Against America I was curious about that length because I've always like reading them. I've always liked reading the short novels of Dostoyevsky or Henry James or Conrad and I wanted to see what it was like to write 150 pages or 40,000, anywhere between 40 and 50,000 words. So I've taken a crack at it and I rather like it.

Q: If "The Plot Against America" could be summed as "what would have happened if Lindbergh had become president in 1940?" What would a similar sentence be for "Indignation?"

A: Hm, hm, hm, hm. This is a real quiz.

Q: Right. Pick A, B or C

A: Hm, hm, hm, hm. You give me A, B and C and I'll get it. Um, I don't know. I don't know. It's about a decent, reasonable young man who gets thrust into a situation in which he's always having to defend his probity when he's done nothing wrong and he feels a great sense of injustice in that. And then he gets put down or ... he's ruined by being unable to accomodate himself to the institutional authority, even though he's not a rebel or a malcontent. He just get caught in the institutional authority.

Q: The Winesburg reference was to Winesburg, Ohio.

A: Sure.

Q: Quite deliberate, of course.

A: Sure. I thought that if there was a college in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, it would be this college.

Q: So nobody at Bucknell has anything to worry about?

A: I don't think so. Nobody has anything to worry about from a book.

Q: Using a narrator who's not named Nathan Zuckerman or Philip Roth or anyone ... how was that as a liberating device for you?

A: It was fun to make him up and to see what he did and to put him through his paces. It was a liberating device.